Box Nine (20 page)

Now, drinking a European tea spiked with a cheap rye, Ike studies Ephraim's attire and attempts to calm himself. Whenever he's rattled, Ike has found that an hour's browse through the rooms of Ephraim's home will settle him down, give him perspective. He has known Ephraim for almost ten years and he has recently given up on determining if his chronic manner of dress—black wool pants, threadbare white shirt with tiny turn-down collar, maroon suspenders, maroon bow tie, cowl-collared grey cardigan—is natural or an affectation, a manifestation of Ephraim's
idea
of how an eccentric Yankee bookseller, feigning pennilessness, would dress. Now, when Ephraim lights up a bowlful of tobacco in one of his grandfather's ancient, hand-carved pipes, Ike just smiles and takes in the pleasant smell of apples.

Over the years they have engaged in hundreds of hours of battle over the merits of the classical English puzzle-box mysteries of the elite class versus the more character-oriented morality plays of the desperate American individual. Ephraim is the Anglophile. Ike, surprisingly, likes his book crimes hard-boiled and urban. Neither one of them knows what to make of the new wave of
déco noir
books from France where there is no hero, little plot, and just page after page of random, bizarre violence.

“Did you try the book idea out on your sister yet?” Ephraim asks offhandedly, jamming a felt cleaner into the end of one of the pipes.

“Haven't found the right moment,” Ike says.

The shop just isn't having the calming effect today. He feels jittery, tentative. His lungs feel constricted. He should have taken the mutilated fish as an omen.

A phone upstairs begins to ring and Ephraim pulls himself out of his chair and starts up the stairs, saying to Ike, “Tend the shop for a second.”

Ike finishes his tea and rye with a single, long swallow, then gets up and starts to pace. Eventually, he begins to walk in a large circle through the whole of the first floor, dining room to pantry to kitchen to parlor to music alcove to living room to front hall, back to the dining room. He wonders as he walks what it must have been like to grow up in a house that was literally filled, wall-to-wall, with books. Do you end up appreciating them in a way that the average person cannot? Or do you take them for granted, expect their continued presence the way debutantes expect money and attention?

He moves through the circle again, pausing this time in the parlor, inspecting, again, all the first editions inside the nowantique, glass-door mahogany bookcase that rises as high as the eleven-foot ceilings. Most of the books in the case have been for sale as long as Ike has been coming to the shop. They're very high priced, mint collector's quality, fairly rare. Ike has suggested that Ephraim alarm the store for the sake of these volumes alone. He stares at the spines of the ones he'd love to possess, reads the authors' names—Chesterton, Collins, Hornung, Futrelle, Morley.

Ike takes a step back from the case, stands silent, and listens. He rarely gets moments alone like this and though he knows Ephraim wouldn't be pleased, he tells himself that possibly handling one of these treasures might turn things around for him, salvage the day a bit. Besides, his hands are clean and all the money he's spent in the shop should entitle him to at least hold the first edition of
Red Harvest
for a minute.

He slowly pulls open one of the doors and is impressed by its weight. He reaches in and pulls down a Chesterton—
The Club of Queer Trades.
Written in 1905, Ike guesses, and opens the volume to prove himself right. He hears Ephraim move upstairs, gets nervous, slides the book back into place on the shelf, and closes the case door. He hasn't felt this kind of jumpiness since he stopped taking that asthma medication fifteen years ago.

He walks into the huge kitchen, lined recently with library-style shelving to create cramped mini-aisles. Ephraim has pulled the “True Crime” section out of the basement where it was getting a little musty, and given it a full aisle in the kitchen. Ike browses it now and just the names off the spines make him uneasy. They're all here, all the famous and most depraved murderers in the collective history of our worst fears—Torquemada, Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Richard Speck, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, and, of course, Manson. Manson gets almost an entire shelf to himself.

Ike does not read true-crime books. He doesn't see the entertainment, can't understand how someone could squeeze any enjoyment out of them. But he continually browses them, pulls them down off the shelf and studies the dust jackets. Sometimes he'll force himself to open to the photographs and take a quick peek. It's become a small test he makes himself endure every few visits to the shop.

He settles now on a title he's never seen before:
Matamoros
—
Devil's Playland.
It's a fat volume, maybe two inches wide at the spine and jacketed in glossy black with blood-red block lettering. Ike would bet his life that there are plenty of photos and more than one will be ridiculously lurid.

He reaches up and grabs the volume, pulls it out from its neighbors with a little effort, and lets out a shocked scream. Through the space left between the books he can see Eva's head.

Eva screams back at him.

Ephraim's feet come running across the upstairs floor and he's yelling, “What's wrong? What's happened?”

Eva comes around to Ike's aisle and they face each other, breathing like they've finished sprinting a lap around the city.

“For Christ sake,” Ike heaves.

Eva has her hand plastered over her mouth, but as air comes into her lungs and seconds go by, she begins to smile and shake her head.

Ephraim rushes into the kitchen, finds them in the aisle, and just stares, eyes bulging a bit and lips pulled in.

Ike lets out a long, heavy breath, slowly reshelves the crime book, nods to both of them, and says, “I'm sorry, sorry, really. God. I didn't hear Eva come in and when I looked through to the next aisle, I don't know, I just …” He shrugs the rest of his explanation.

“I'm sorry I startled you, Ike,” Eva says. “Your message said to come over here and the door was open and no one was at the front desk out there so I …” and she repeats his shrug.

Ephraim, seeming a little offended that the tranquillity of his shop has been even temporarily broken, frowns at both of them. “This is a friend of yours, Ike?” he asks.

“I'm sorry,” Ike says again, and before he can make any introductions, Eva grabs Ephraim's hand and pumps it and says, “Eva Barnes, very nice to meet you. I work with Ike. Very nice place you have here. I've always intended to come in.”

Ephraim stares at Ike and says, “Very nice to meet you, Ms. Barnes.”

There's a beat of edgy silence between the three of them until Ephraim says, “If you two will excuse me, I've got some things to tend to at my desk,” and leaves.

They both watch him walk back to the living room, then they look at each other and Eva says, “Are you all right, Ike? I'm sorry, again, I didn't mean to startle you like that …”

“I'm sorry I yelled,” Ike says. “It's just when I looked through and saw your face on the other side of the stacks, I just …” and again he shrugs.

“I got home and heard your message on my answering machine,” Eva says. “I came right down here.”

“Yeah, I appreciate that. That's really nice of you …”

“It's not a problem, but what is it you needed to speak to me about? And why here?”

At the opposite end of the kitchen are two old rocking chairs, overstuffed and low to the ground, the backs covered with Ephraim's grandmother's handmade quilts. Ike leads Eva, by the hand, to the two rockers, settles down into one, and indicates with a hand gesture that she should do the same.

Eva sits and sinks deep into the chair, finds it, surprisingly, just as comfortable as it had looked.

“I come down here,” Ike says, “when things are bothering me. I come down here to hang out. Think, read. Drink a little with Ephraim. It's just a great place to be, you know? Some people go to bars, right?”

“So I'm told,” Eva says.

“My sister has this weird old diner she hangs out at, you know? She's never offered to take me there and I've never asked to go. It's her place. Place to think. I just think everyone should have some certain place, some designated area.”

“It would be nice.”

“You have any place like mat, Eva?”

“Nothing that comes to mind right away. Why did you ask me to come down here, Ike?”

“I'm really sorry to bother you like this. I really shouldn't have called, I guess. Those machines. Those answering machines. I think you hear this machine and you think, okay, it's like this middleman between you and the person you're calling and you can say things that …”

“What am I doing here, Ike?”

“I'm really sorry about this, Eva. I think it was that fish today, seeing that fish, and nobody claiming box nine. I'm feeling a little over the edge, if you know what I mean.”

Eva comes forward in the rocker, leans the top part of her body over her lap, holds her chin up with clasped hands, and stares at Ike.

“This will sound, you know, not only dumb,” he says, “but, I guess, sort of childish.”

She stares.

“I was wondering if you could tell me, talk to me, tell me why the others hate me so much?”

“The others?”

“The other carriers, the others at the station.”

“Rourke?”

“Rourke, Wilson, Bromberg, even Jacobi. I swear I never did a thing to them. I've always tried to be friendly, even help out, you know. I'm union, I pay the dues. I don't shirk the bad routes. I'm not some loud, insulting guy.”

“They hate me too, Ike.”

“Yeah,” he says sheepishly, “but, forgive me and all, but you're the supervisor, okay? You're the authority. You're the boss. There's a whole tradition there. This is what I mean. If I were in your position, which, by the way, I wouldn't want, not in a million years, but if I were in your position, I'd be able to understand it. I probably wouldn't even give it a lot of thought. It'd be—bang, okay, I'm the boss and they hate the boss. But I'm not the boss, I'm just another carrier, and it's starting to drive me nuts. Why?”

“I think you're looking at this the wrong way, Ike.”

“I think what I want is, like, what's the word? An overview. Am I using the right word? I want an overview of my personality. I mean, let me come out and say it, I think you're one of the most intelligent people I know”—Ike smiles—“and don't let Ephraim hear me say this, right? I'm asking for some help. I'm asking you to identify the problems for me.”

“The problems?”

“With the way I act or speak or move. Or whatever. That's got to be the first step in changing things.”

Eva sits back in the rocker and it makes a loud creaking noise.

“I was very pleased when I heard your message, Ike. I took it as a sign, as a good omen, a signal that I wasn't alone. On my way home from the station I had been thinking about calling you.”

“Calling me?”

“Is there any other reason you asked me here today, Ike? Let's face it, we're both in that pretty awful position of not knowing how many cards to play.”

“You've lost me.”

“My guess would be that we're both operating completely on instinct at this point. We both have information that we're anxious to share, we're dying to share, but we don't know who to trust.”

“Information about what?”

“We're dying to trust someone, and I think that we've both got a hunch that at some point, if this thing continues, there'll come that moment, that leap, that cutting of all nets, when we have to trust someone, it's an imperative, there's no alternative.”

“What thing?”

“All right, take this moment, right now. My brain has a few avenues it can go down. A: everything is as it seems and you know nothing and you called me to discuss some inferiority problem. B: you're so scared and confused and justifiably paranoid about what you do, in fact, know, that you're hesitating over sharing your information with me until you can confirm that I'm on your side or, at the very least, unaware and innocent and
not
on their side. And then there's C, which, if it's the true avenue, I've made the big mistake right here in the beginning and the whole thing is over. C Avenue says you, Ike Thomas, are in on it, are part of their group, and you've been positioned as an apparent outsider to see how much I know, if anything.”

Ike squints at her and says, “I don't get it. I don't know what the hell you're talking about.”

“That doesn't tell me anything, does it?”

“I guess I've made a mistake here …”

“You ever been to the Bach Room, Ike?”

He starts to breathe heavily again. He wants to call Ephraim. He says, “I'm sorry to have bothered you.”

“What's the story on the back room at the Bach Room, Ike?”

“I think maybe you'd better go, Ms. Barnes …”

“Ms. Barnes,” Eva says, her voice going high and loud. “Oh, please, can we at least address each other properly. Ms. Barnes?”

“I'll show you to the door now.”

“What's the story, Ike? You call Rourke now? You tell him there's a new problem?”

“I'm not feeling too well, really …”

“You're going a little green in the face there, Ike. How good an actor are you?”

“I don't, I don't, I have to …”

He bolts out of his rocker and runs across the room to the stacks. He darts into a random aisle and starts to hyperventilate.

Eva comes after him slowly and when she finds him, her voice is like that of an older, calmer doctor, reassuring, soothing, a wife's voice of hope and control and protection.